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Things to do in London this weekend

Can’t decide what to do with your two delicious days off? This is how to fill them up

Rosie Hewitson
Alex Sims
Written by
Rosie Hewitson
&
Alex Sims
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It’s officially the first weekend of Spring. That’s right, we made it through the rough Great British winter and now you can reward yourself by hitting up all of London’s new season of theatre, art and events. 

There are some cultural treats in store this week, including Raven Row’s five-star art show ‘Some May Work As Symbols’, which according to Time Out’s art critic is a ‘gorgeous, in-depth, museum-quality’ exploration of mid-century Brazilian art.

There are also glittering Ramadan light displays to spot across the city, an inaugural literature festival at Ally Pally to visit with some wonderful speakers, beautiful ceramics markets to browse and a film fest dedicated to Italian cinema to get stuck into. 

Still got gaps in your diary? Embrace the warmer days with a look at the best places to see spring flowers in London, or have a cosy time in one of London’s best pubs. If you’ve still got some space in your week, check out London’s best bars and restaurants, or take in one of these lesser-known London attractions.

RECOMMENDED: Listen and, most importantly, subscribe to Time Out’s brand new, weekly podcast ‘Love Thy Neighbourhood’ and hear famous Londoners show our editor Joe Mackertich around their favourite bits of the city.

What’s on this weekend?

  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • Spitalfields
  • Recommended

The story goes that modernism ripped everything up and started again; and nowhere did more of that mid-century aesthetic shredding than Brazil. Helio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark, Ivan Serpa et al forged a brand new path towards minimalism. But Raven Row’s incredible new show is challenging that oversimplified narrative, showing how figuration, traditional aesthetics and ritual symbolism were an integral part of experimental Brazilian art from 1950-1980. The whole thing’s great. It’s a gorgeous, in-depth, museum-quality exploration of creativity at its most fertile, modernism at its most exciting and abstraction at its most beautiful. 

  • Things to do
  • City Life

Ramadan 2024 has begun, with Muslims all over the world participating in a period of reflection, prayer, fasting and community gatherings from the evening of Sunday March 10 until Tuesday April 9. To mark the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar, areas across the capital will be lit up with Ramadan light displays. The huge display of 30,000 lights will illuminate the streets from Piccadilly Circus all along Coventry Street to Leicester Square. There’s also a brand-new Ramadan display at Edgware Road with a bespoke, 2.9m tall installation featuring a crescent moon. 

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Head to Token Studio, where you’ll be treated to a relaxing, fun 90-minute session that will involve throwing a potter’s wheel, making finger-sized miniature pottery, learning hand-building techniques, and lastly, painting an already-fired piece to create your own beautiful design. Or if you prefer to focus on design, opt for the pottery painting class, where you can pick a ready-made piece to be your canvas, be it a mug, plate or bowl. The best bit? You can bring your own beer! 

Book your BYOB Pottery Experience at Token Studio for £32 only through Time Out offers

  • Things to do
  • Literary events
  • Alexandra Palace

Grade II-listed north London icon Alexandra Palace plays host to the inaugural edition of this brand new literary festival, which promises four jam-packed days of readings, panel discussions, workshops and book signings. Celebrated authors in attendance include former Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen, ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ creator Lemony Snicket, bestselling crime writer Erin Kelly and Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlistee Natalie Haynes. 

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  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • Bethnal Green
  • Recommended

There’s a warning in Sibylle Ruppert’s art: if the devil doesn't get you, technology will. And if they both miss, it’s your own perverse instincts and desires that’ll consume you. The German artist (1942-2011) filled her drawings, paintings and collages with writhing bodies and gnashing teeth, evil spirits and throbbing phalluses. The implication is that all of this chaotic sci fi horror porn was a way for Ruppert to deal with the legacy of the war and a litany of personal traumas. All this erotic, traumatic horror is way too over the top, absolutely obscene, disconcertingly vile and genuinely amazing.

  • Things to do
  • Markets and fairs
  • Haggerston

Turning Earth’s seasonal ceramics market is back and this time around it’s celebrating its 10th anniversary, making a return to its very first Hoxton studio where the original market was held. More than 120 makers will come together for two days to sell their wares alongside live folk music, street food, delicious coffee and craft beer. 

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  • Art
  • Aldwych

The world’s longest-running art fair comes to Somerset House for its 39th edition. Wend your way from stall to stall to see what the exhibitors have to offer from rare prints by Old Masters, themed exhibits and newly published print works. With prices ranging from a few hundred into the thousands, this favourite among collectors is also a good place for any novice looking to start buying art. Special exhibits this year include a tribute to British Pop Art pioneer Joe Tilson and a curated display by Norman Ackroyd, one of the UK’s most distinguished artist-printmakers. 

  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • Theatre
  • Drama
  • Richmond
  • Recommended

There is a samovar onstage from the get-go in Trevor Nunn’s Orange Tree debut. This is period dress, crisp English accents and a big honking samovar, Chekhov done as ‘authentically Russian’ in the way that literally only the British actually do. The cast is solid, and ‘Ted Lasso’ star Lance is particularly good with a funny, boisterous take on the character. Sometimes Vanya can feel like an eccentric, unchanging spirit of the estate on which the play is set, but here you can sense his happier, more vibrant past. It’s still poignant and piercing, one of the greatest plays ever written. 

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  • Things to do
  • Film events
  • South Bank

BFI Flare is back at BFI Southbank (and to the BFI Player online) for its 38th edition, showcasing the best new LGBTQ+ cinema from around the world over ten days. This year’s festival kicks off with a world premiere of ‘Layla’, a debut film from London-based drag performer, screenwriter and director Amrou Al-Kadhi, and closes with ‘Lady Like’, Luke Willis’s documentary on ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ contestant Lady Camden. In between there’ll be an extensive programme of LGBTQ+ films as well as talks with actors and makers including Elliot Page, Amrou Al-Kadhi and Jeffrey Schwarz and plenty of after-parties. 

  • Things to do
  • Markets and fairs
  • Dulwich

Vintage furniture dealers and top modern designers come out in force for this excellent mid-century fair, featuring classics of British, American and Scandinavian 20th-century design from Eames to Ercol. It’s a very stylish showcase of high-quality, highly covetable furniture, lighting, art and homeware that you can buy direct from the 85 stands of vintage dealers and modern designers. 

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  • Things to do
  • Film events
  • South Kensington

Back for its fourteenth edition, the Cinema Made In Italy festival has a packed programme at South Kensington’s Ciné Lumière curated by Adrian Wootton OBE, chief executive of Film London. Look out for everything from new releases like crime drama ‘Adagio’, which was a favourite at the Venice Film Festival, and period drama ‘La Chimera’ starring Josh O’Connor, to restored old favourites, as well as Q&As with the filmmakers. 

  • Things to do
  • Classes and workshops
  • Royal Docks

Newham’s Riverscape development is so much more than a cool new neighbourhood, as this year it’s set to transform into an Easter-filled escape. On Saturday a whole host of family-friendly events will be taking place. There’ll be a free-to-enter pop-up farm, as well as an Easter egg hunt with Macaroni Penguin (an east London family space) and an egg-decorating workshop too!

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  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • Bow
  • Recommended

As artist and writer Joshua Leon shows in his Chisenhale exhibition, names are malleable things for Jews; signifiers that can be altered to allow you to better fit in. Bob Dylan’s real name is Robert Zimmerman, Joey Ramone’s was Jeffrey Hyman, and on and on. Leon’s grandfather was born Kurt Hutter, but in the programmes to accompany his musical performances he became Ken or Curtis. This nominative malleability is at the heart of Leon’s sparse show. The ideas are brilliant, moving, intimate. He asks what it means to have a name, to hide, to choose a path, to integrate, to be rejected. The work has Jewish roots, but these are big universal questions filled with a silent pain that anyone can relate to. 

Embark on an inspiring journey around the world through art at the Sony World Photography Awards exhibition 2024. The highly anticipated annual showcase returns to Somerset House this April, bringing extraordinary images – from luscious landscapes to impressive architecture, striking street shots to moving documentary projects – to an iconic location. 

Get exclusive £12 tickets to the Sony World Photography Awards Exhibition, only through Time Out offers

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  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Theatre
  • Musicals
  • Covent Garden
  • Recommended

‘Standing at the Sky’s Edge’ is a musical about three generations of incomers in Sheffield’s iconic – and infamous – brutalist housing estate, Park Hill. It’s a stunning achievement, which takes the popular but very different elements of retro pop music, agitprop and soap opera, melts them in the crucible of 50 years of social trauma and forges something potent, gorgeous and unlike any big-ticket musical we’ve seen before. It has deeply local foundations, based on local songwriter Richard Hawley's music and it was made in Sheffield, at the Crucible Theatre, with meticulous care and attention. It has all the feels – joy, lust, fear, sadness, despair, are crafted into an emotional edifice which stands nearly as tall as the place that inspired it.

  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theatre
  • Drama
  • South Bank
  • Recommended

Francesca Mills is luminous in the title role of this sadistic thriller by Shakespeare’s young contemporary, John Webster. Mills speaks blank verse immaculately and emotionally, her voice shimmering on the edge of laughter or tears. Webster’s plays are more lurid and less subtle than Shakespeare’s. In this one, the Duchess’s evil twin torments and destroys her and her babies because he is so jealous of her secret marriage. Intimate, lit only by candles or, for one nightmarish central scene, plunged into darkness – ‘Malfi’ was designed for a theatre exactly like the Sam Wanamaker. There’s a memorable lustre to this otherwise straightforward production.

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  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • Soho
  • Recommended

Death, pain and injustice course through this year’s Deutsche Borse Photography Foundation Prize. It’s in the mass graves of Hrair Sarkissian, the feminist ire of Valie Export, the indigenous erasure of Rajesh Vangad and Gauri Gill, and the historical trauma of Lebohang Kganye. So while it doesn’t make for especially pleasant viewing, it does make for some powerful art. Through all the anger, sadness and pain here, you get the sense of these artists using photography to fight against societal wrongs. This is the camera as witness, as testament, and, more than anything, as weapon.

  • Things to do
  • Exhibitions
  • Lewisham

After celebrating its 75th anniversary last year, this multimedia exhibition at the Migration Museum in Lewisham delves into the history of the NHS, and to the thousands of dedicated non-British workers who have contributed to its delivery of healthcare. Through photography, artifacts, and a newly commissioned interactive music video installation, their stories are lovingly told. Around 1 in 6 people within the organisation today are non-British, and many others are descendants of migrant healthcare workers. It’s a wonderful way to gain some insight into how working for such a precious but pressured organisation has impacted their lives.

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Elevate your Saturday lunch plans with a trip to this Indo-Chinese Brasserie. Based in the heart of Westminster, Shanghai Noir invites you to join them and immerse yourself in a realm of gastronomic delight, where every moment is infused with the essence of indulgence and refinement. Indulge in sumptuous Chinese cuisine, including Desi Chow Mein spring rolls, Manchurian Cauliflower Fritters with Jasmine rice, and a delicious mango pudding to top it all off.

Enjoy three courses and a lychee Bellini for £25 only through Time Out offers.

  • Things to do
  • Film events
  • London

The best of Polish filmmaking will be taking over a host of London’s iconic screens (including the Southbank Centre, Ciné Lumière, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, plus many, many more) for the 22nd edition of Kinoteka Polish Film Festival. See everything from newly released movies to hidden gems and iconic Polish cinema. ‘Green Border’, a moving depiction of debates on migration in Europe, will kick things off at the opening gala at the BFI Southbank. Plus, look out for screenings accompanied by live music, panel talks, discussions and more. Dzięki!

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  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theatre
  • Drama
  • Shepherd’s Bush
  • Recommended

In ‘Shifters’, Benedicte Lombe’s follow-up to her Susan Blackburn Prize-winning play ‘Lava’, sparks fly and past emotions weave their way into the present. Why is the feeling of falling in love for the first time so profound?, it asks. Will we remember it forever? In this bittersweet, woozy rom-com the imprint of big, wild adolescent infatuation can’t be forgotten. It’s a play with similarities to Nick Payne’s ‘Constellations’, and it has the sprawling scope of a love story that spans a lifetime. This is a romance overflowing with heart.

  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theatre
  • Musicals
  • Stratford
  • Recommended

In 2004, as his swansong at Stratford East after a 25-year tenure as artistic director, Philip Hedley programmed ‘The Big Life’. It is bittersweet then, that the hit musical returns to the venue to celebrate its 20-year anniversary in the year of his death – Hedley passed away in January. His memory lives on in this belter of a musical revival and time has done little to age its story. Today it is as infectious, heart-rendering and as achingly resonant as ever. 

 

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  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theatre
  • Musicals
  • Shaftesbury Avenue
  • Recommended

Indie-folk musician Anaïs Mitchell’s musical retelling of the Orpheus story began life in the mid-’00s as a lo-fi song cycle, which she gigged around New England before scraping the money together to record it as a critically acclaimed 2010 concept album that featured the likes of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and Ani DiFranco on guest vocals as the various mythological heroes and villains. Now, ‘Hadestown’ is a full-blown musical directed by the visionary Rachel Chavkin, its success as a show vastly outstripping that of the record. It’s a musical of beautiful texture and tone and it doesn’t hurt that Mitchell has penned some flat-out brilliant songs. It’s a gloriously improbable triumph.

  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theatre
  • Drama
  • Covent Garden
  • Recommended

Would YOU go fascist for Matt Smith? That’s maybe not the exact moral of German director Thomas Ostermeier’s fabled Ibsen production, now receiving its English language premiere. But it’s certainly something we’re made to contemplate during this deliciously spikey production’s showstopping central scene. Ostermeier and Florian Borchmeyer’s modern adaptation of Ibsen’s 1882 classic sticks pretty close to the original in many ways with a lot of stylistic things chucked in for impact. It’s light, mischievous, absurd and sincerely provocative. 

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  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • Charing Cross Road
  • Recommended

At some point in the past, ‘The Time Is Always Now’ might have caused uproar. But this isn’t the past, this is 2024, so seeing room after room of paintings of Black figures by Black artists in the National Portrait Gallery isn’t shocking: instead, it’s just totally normal. The artists here depict the Black figure in endless ways and contexts. As straight portraits by Amy Sherald, as forgotten figures from art history by Barbara Walker, as characters of memetic mythology by Michael Armitage. The Black figure, like Blackness itself, isn't one thing, it’s complex, indefinable.

Never ending baskets of delicious dim sum. Need we say more? That means tucking into as many dumplings, rolls and buns as you can scoff down, all expertly put together by a Chinatown restaurant celebrating more than ten years of business. Taiwanese pork buns? Check. Pork and prawn soup dumplings? You betcha. ‘Supreme’ crab meat xiao long bao? Of course! And just to make sure you’re all set, Leong’s Legend is further furnishing your palate with a chilled glass of prosecco. Lovely bubbly.

Get 51% off bottomless dim sum at Leong's Legend only through Time Out Offers

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  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • Whitechapel
  • Recommended

British Franco-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira has transformed the Whitechapel Gallery (just as she did the French Pavilion at the last Venice Biennale) into a series of sets based on classic films; there’s the dancehall bar from ‘Le Bal’, a home from ‘The Battle of Algiers’, the coffin from ‘The Stranger’. All films made in the wake of Algerian independence in 1962, all made between Algeria and Europe, all passionate documents of liberation, the radical potential of social upheaval and the power of militant cinema. Sedira endlessly blurs lines. Are you, as a viewer of the work, an actor? The director? The audience, sat on rickety cinema seats? Sedira’s love letter to militant cinema is a celebration of the death of colonialism, she’s allowing you to taste a hint of what it might mean to shrug off the shackles of oppression.

  • Art
  • Art

Someone’s gone and picked the best young art graduates in the country and put their work on display at Camden Art Centre. Which can only mean that New Contemporaries is back to lift some of the winter gloom. New Contemporaries has been putting out open calls for recent graduates and then giving them their first big exhibition since 1949, so they know what they’re up to. This year’s selection is as good as ever. As a glimpse of the state of art in the UK, it’s pretty unbeatable.

 

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  • Museums
  • South Kensington

If the Modern House is your fave Instagram account, get a load of this new exhibition from the V&A full of stylish, irresistible photographs of ‘Tropical Modernism’: an architectural style developed in the hot, humid conditions of West Africa in the 1940s. It’s far more than just property porn though. The style truly emerged after independence was granted in India and Ghana, when the nations began distinguishing themselves from colonial culture and the illustrations, photography and films could provide some clue on how to build homes for our warming world. 

  • Things to do
  • Aldwych

Fancy eating your sad office sarnies in a cocoon of bamboo? Somerset House is turning its bombastic neoclassical courtyard into a garden full of the panda food which you can frolic about in for free to enjoy a quick picnic, a moment of calm in your busy work day, or an inevitable photo-op. The immersive installation is a new large-scale commission from Hong-Kong based artist Zheng Bo that ‘invites visitors to temporarily disconnect from their fast-paced, hyper-connected everyday lives by immersing themselves in the biosphere’. 

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  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • Bankside
  • Recommended

It’s all in your mind, a figment of your imagination, and that’s how Yoko Ono wants it. The pioneering nonagenarian conceptualist – whose life’s work has been unfairly eclipsed by her Beatles-adjacent fame – wants to plant a seed in your brain, and that’s it. That’s the art. At its best, her art is simple, direct, and, when she started doing it in the mid-1950s, absolutely revolutionary. With her marriage to John Lennon, she formed an artistic partnership that fought for change, peace and an end to war. After Lennon’s death, Ono only became more utopian. Some of this will rub a cynical mind the wrong way, but it’s the earnestness that saves it. Because Ono means it, she believes peace is possible, and wants you to believe it too. 

Escape reality through maximum immersion and experience 42 masterpieces from 29 of the world’s most iconic artists, each reimagined through cutting-edge technology. Marble Arch’s high-tech Frameless gallery houses four unique exhibition spaces with hypnotic visuals reimaging work from the likes of Bosch, Dalí and more, all with an atmospheric score. Now get 90 minutes of eye-popping gallery time for just £20 through Time Out offers.

£20 tickets to Frameless immersive art experience only through Time Out offers 

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  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theatre
  • Drama
  • Leicester Square
  • Recommended

This one-woman stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s short horror is a dizzying technical masterpiece, boasting a tour-de-force performance from Sarah ‘Shiv Roy’ Snook in a multitude of roles. It is also incredibly camp – a show that makes ‘Mamma Mia!’ look like a monster truck rally. Snook plays every single character and is lavishly costumed up in parts that range from elderly pink-haired gentlewomen to rough, bearded scoundrels. It’s a cabaret tour de force, that feels like it’s simultaneously beamed in from Wilde’s England and a hundred years into our future.

Kanishka has launched a brand-new brunch menu focussing on PanIndian food, with a menu embracing the flavours of India’s various regions, from Punjab to Kerala, Kolkata to Delhi and everywhere in between. Kanishka’s skilled kitchen team, led by chef Atul Kochhar, have curated a symphony of new dishes, including Khari paneer tikka, Palak paneer and Chicken tikka pie. And the best bit? You’ll be greeted with a seasonal welcome Kanishka punch cocktail and two hours of bottomless wine or beer. 

Get brunch at Atul Kochhar's Kanishka for £35, only through Time Out Offers.

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  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • Chelsea
  • Recommended

The guts of society are hidden away, but Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has spent his long career eviscerating them and putting them on display. All the things that make modern life tick – the mines for our batteries, the farms for our food, the abattoirs for our meat – are kept secret, out of view because they lay bare the damage we’re doing to the planet. Burtynsky’s vast, mega-scale photographs here at the Saatchi Gallery drag those private shames out into the open. He photographs salt marshes carving up the Spanish coastline, gold mines spilling cyanide into the Johannesburg’s groundwater. It would make for grim viewing if it wasn’t all so beautiful. It’s all as shocking as it is sad, as awful as it is pretty, and as abstract as it is terrifyingly real.  

  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theatre
  • Shakespeare
  • Islington
  • Recommended

South African director Yaël Farber is by no means the first to rack up a three-and-a-half-hour ‘Lear’, but her super atmospheric, wilfully poised style is perfectly suited to it. She simply has no fast setting – not even a medium one – and her heightened, nightmare-like aesthetic rises to meet the strangeness in Shakespeare’s tragedy of insanity and old age. Don’t go making plans to do anything afterwards, but this is a gripping piece of entertainment. Farber plays the tragedy’s mix of druidic weirdness, human tragedy and hard-nosed realpolitik perfectly – ‘The West Wing’ by way of a Sunn O))) gig.

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  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theatre
  • Experimental
  • Hackney Wick
  • Recommended

Anyone up for a hilarious comedy about slavery? Rhianna Ilube’s play is as outrageous as it sounds, set in Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle, where enslaved Ghanaians were held before being loaded onto ships and sent across the Atlantic. It’s now a tourist destination, with a gift shop of course, where Samuel hosts hourly tours for diasporic visitors making a pilgrimage to the site for the Year of Return. Ilube takes the premise and turns it into a see-sawing satire about atrocity tourism. It’s a fresh and fascinating play packed with unpredictability and seriousness of purpose but a lightness of touch in achieving it.

  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • South Bank
  • Recommended

Can stone flow? Can metal ooze? Can hardness be rendered soft? I mean, generally, no. But artists are alchemists at heart, so they’re not going to let something like solidity stand in their way. This show looks at 60 years of artists hellbent on the impossible: creating sculptures that ooze and bulge and throb and breathe. Artist duo Drift’s silk lampshades pulsate like jellyfish when you walk in. Teresa Solar Abboud’s airbrushed constructions look like the limbs of some impossible being and Holly Hendry’s twisting knots of metal ducting look like freshly plucked guts. There’s no narrative to unpick, it’s just about ooze, about seeping and twisting and morphing. 

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  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theatre
  • Drama
  • Leicester Square
  • Recommended

Jez Butterworth’s first play in seven years unfurls with the richness and depth of a well-crafted novel. Backed by West End super producer Sonia Friedman and directed by Sam Mendes, initially, it’s pretty much a kitchen sink drama, following a fractious group of sisters in the sweltering summer of ’76 as they reunite at their childhood home in Blackpool. The occasion is the imminent death of their mother Veronica. It’s a drama about the pain and joy and complicatedness of family, and the story flits from one period to another. Tangents are taken. New characters are woven in at daringly late junctures. It’s increasingly dense and charged. Butterworth remains a one-off, a man who can write plays about ordinary people that carry the charge of the great tragedies.

Designed by visionary Tom Dixon, Sea Containers Restaurant is an all-day dining experience along the River Thames. With a three-course sharing platter inspired by the golden age of transatlantic travel and the bounty of local fresh produce, this menu celebrates seasonality and ingredient-led cooking, making it suitable for any occasion. After your meal, you are welcome to visit 12th Knot, the rooftop bar on the 12th floor of Sea Containers London hotel featuring stylish seating and breath-taking views across the river Thames and London’s skyline.

Get three course sharing menu and Prosecco for £30 at Sea Containers, only through Time Out offers.

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  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • Aldwych
  • Recommended

Heads hang heavy, bodies sink into the shadowy corners of the room. Frank Auerbach’s charcoal portraits are dismal, dour things, heaving with hurt and pain, but they’re also brutally, shockingly beautiful. Auerbach came of age alongside Leon Kossoff, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon (he’s still at it well into his 90s too), part of a group of Londoners intent on reworking the form of painting itself. Auerbach did that in the post-war period with thick globs of pigment, creating dense, viscous canvases, closer to sculptures than paintings. But this show at the Courtauld is about his charcoal portraits from the 1950s and ’60s. They’re not his most famous works, but they’re incredible.

  • Things to do
  • Exhibitions
  • Forest Hill

You can rarely go too long at the Horniman without encountering some form of prehistoric life. Now it’s playing host to ‘Dinosaur rEvolution’, based around five showstopping animatronic models – including a seven-metre-long T-Rex – the general idea is that it’s compliant with current scientific thinking on what these creatures looked like: so lots of feathers, basically, alongside quills, spikes and all sorts of vibrant colours. There are also various games and activities, plus a smattering of casts of actual fossils. 

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  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theatre
  • Drama
  • Whitehall
  • Recommended

Here are two things that theatre can do really badly: plays about plays, and plays about the importance of plays. Somehow Sam Holcroft has managed to write a play-within-a-play-about-a-play-within-a-play-about-a-play that tackles the importance of theatre while being un-self-important and actually very funny, and also a structural marvel. It starts by telling us we’re at a wedding (spoiler: we’re not) and then tells us we’re in a play (spoiler: we are) and then keeps peeling back layers and pulling rugs until you start questioning who you actually and what your role is in all this. It’s both a comedy and a sharp bit of political writing. 

  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • Victoria
  • Recommended

Hans Holbein was special. And he had to be to make it in the Tudor Court. Arriving from Basel with nothing but a letter of recommendation from humanist philosopher Erasmus, Holbein worked his way to the very top of English society, painting aristocrats, lawyers, politicians, soldiers and, eventually, the king himself. This deeply atmospheric show brings together sketches and drawings by Holbein into a single vivid portrait of sixteenth-century life. The real gold is in watching a master figure things out, in finding out how he made images that have survived the centuries, and still somehow look modern today. 

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  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • Bloomsbury
  • Recommended

This is a rollicking-looking new exhibition for the British Museum, which attempts to put you inside the daily life – both domestic and fighting – of the Roman Legions that controlled much of the world for half a century. It’s about how the elite troops fought: but also about how they lived, and the daily lives of the Empire’s many settled garrisons. Across the course of the exhibit, you’ll meet warriors from Egypt, Italy and England, with over 200 supporting objects, many on display in the UK for the first time, including the world’s oldest intact legionary shield and the world’s oldest set of Roman segmental body armour (which was only unearthed in 2018). 

  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • Piccadilly
  • Recommended

Art isn’t always pretty pictures. Sometimes, art is politics; sometimes, art is power. ‘Entangled Pasts’ places work by contemporary British artists of the African, Caribbean and South Asian diasporas alongside paintings and sculptures by Royal Academicians of the past. The aim is to highlight how art has served to perpetuate racism and colonialism, or at the very least profit from it. It opens with depictions of Black figures by Gainsborough and Reynolds, portraits of former slaves, abolitionists, attendants and illegitimate children. And there are contemporary works by the likes of Yinka Shonibare and Sonia Boyce. 

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If you want to transport yourself to sunny Spain without buying a plane ticket, look no further than BiBo Shoreditch. Located inside the 5-star Mondrian Shoreditch Hotel, this restaurant brings a taste of southwestern Europe to east London. World-famous Chef Dani Garcia brings his unique, vibrant cuisine, offering distinctive and unforgettable flavours. Choose from a selection of tapas for starters, a selection of authentic mains and delicious desserts, all washed down with the fruity taste of sangria. 

£35 for three courses and a glass of sangria at BiBo Shoreditch only through Time Out offers

  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • Bloomsbury
  • Recommended

The most surreal thing about Shuvinai Ashoona’s world of half-human hybrid sea creatures, ice and writhing tentacles is how un-surreal it all is. This is normality for the Inuit artist. She comes from a family and community of artists in Kinngait on Canada’s frozen arctic east coast. She works in an aesthetic tradition where men can be depicted as part-walrus, women can morph into dolphins, and lizard creatures can take part in drawing competitions. Ashoona’s pencil and pen drawings show everyday Inuit life, filled with spiritual presences and hints of encroaching modernity. It’ll leave you shivering, snow-blind and totally mesmerised.

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  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • Aldwych
  • Recommended

Cuteness is presented as a cultural powerhouse at Somerset House’s new exhibition, an internet language that’s spread its grammar throughout society, a contemporary aesthetic force with almost no equal. Does that hypothesis work? Not necessarily, but it’s fun to watch them argue it. The exhibition is a mind-melting assault on the senses, a barrage of objects, ephemera, history and artworks that shoves cuteness down your eyeballs until you want to burst (into pink love hearts). It’s complex, tiring, clever, and very good.

WTTDLondon

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